Through his scholarship and teaching, Nigel Smith is focusing attention
on the works of underappreciated women writers from the 17th century.
Here, he holds his copy of a 1696 printed book, “A Fountain of Gardens:
Watered by the Rivers of Divine Pleasure,” by the prophet and poet Jane
Lead (1623-1704).

Below left: A close-up view of the book's pages.

That soules and bodies one conception have
One birth, one growth, one wast, one death, one grave
That phisick workes on both, wine and disease
Both Change admitt, substraction and encrease.
That soules departing passe not forth entire
And no power bodies can with them inspire
Because oblivion thence doth things deface
And dispositions are in every race ...

English professor gives voice to unknown women writers from the 1600s

Posted May 18, 2006; 04:20 p.m.

by Karin Dienst

Nigel Smith is intent on correcting an injustice. It may be more
than four centuries old, but for him, it is high time to make amends.

A professor of English, Smith is on a mission to bring to light the
work of notable British women authors from the 17th century whose writing has
been lost over time. In many cases, the work — poems, plays and fiction — was
never published and exists only in manuscript form.

Smith asserts that these literary works offer unique insights into
the period in which they were written, and add to our understanding of the
evolution of writing by women. Now, he is sharing his discoveries about these
little-known early modern writers and their remarkably distinct creative
achievements through his own scholarship and teaching.

“I think our understanding of the significance of this writing is
only just beginning,” said Smith. “There has been a big gap in our cultural
knowledge.”

He describes the growing awareness of these writers as the result
of a recovery effort that started in earnest in the late 1980s. At that time,
factors such as an increased interest in manuscripts as “the new frontier” led
to discoveries of original texts in previously unexplored locations, including
cathedral libraries, local government record offices and private collections.
Further, the rise of technology, specifically the Internet, encouraged literary
specialists to share knowledge and document newly found writing through Web
projects.

Last summer, Smith returned to Oxford University, where he taught
before coming to Princeton in 1999 and where he earned his doctorate, to give
the keynote address at an international conference on early modern women
writers. He made use of the occasion to exhort literary scholars to spread the
word about the rediscovered texts and their authors. “I was there to say, ‘You
haven’t finished your work. You have to take this writing and go out and get
the interest of the general reading public.’”

“Despite the efforts of several important feminist critics, the
commonplace view is that the women’s literary tradition in Britain begins with
Mary Wollstonecraft [the author of “Vindication of the Rights of Women” who
lived from 1759 to 1797],” said Smith. But he said that the rediscovery of the
many women writing in the 17th century tells a different story, and illustrates
the diverse nature of much of these literary efforts.

It was during the 1600s, a period shaped by the tumult of the
English Civil War, that many women, some of whom ran households and estates in
the absence of husbands, wrote for their female friends and sometimes even for
broader audiences. At this time, published books were also more readily
available, and education for women was no longer solely the privilege of the
upper class.

Smith singles out Aphra Behn, who was writing in the late 1600s, as
“the first non-aristocratic woman to command a reputation as a playwright and
to command a place in the book market and be seen as a part of literary society.”
Her successful publishing experience put Behn on the road to posterity, but,
until recently, few of her female contemporaries were recognized as fellow
travelers.

Finding new expression

One of the literary finds that most excites Smith is Hester Pulter.
Born in 1596, she lived until 1678, a long life that included giving birth to
15 children and, according to scholars, producing more than 100 unpublished
poems.

Without being published, Smith said Pulter was one of many women
who “never had the chance to gain reputations because their writing was for
private circulation.”

Describing Pulter as a “kind of Virginia Woolf figure who writes in
an extremely unusual way,” Smith said her work is so new on the scene today
that only a handful of scholars know it in some detail. Her poetry survives in
just one intriguing manuscript (“Hadassa[’]s Chast[e] Fanc[i]es”), he said,
which was found 10 years ago “uncataloged” and is now housed at the Brotherton
Library at Leeds University in England.

As a specialist of 17th-century verse, Smith, whose Longman
Annotated English Poets edition of Andrew Marvell’s “Poems” is coming out in
paperback this year, said that Pulter’s poetry is “not metrically very
brilliant” and does not stand up in these terms to her male contemporaries,
such as Marvell, John Donne, Ben Jonson and John Milton.

“But,” he said, “if you look at her imagery and understand what
she’s trying to express about her relationship with her daughters, then you
enter a completely new aesthetic sphere.” Smith added, “She has a way of
describing very precisely either the literal appearance of her daughters, who
are grown up, or as dream visions. Both kinds of descriptions are visionary.”

While the private, familial sphere was the dominant theme for
17th-century women writers, their subjects were wide ranging and included love,
nature, politics, religion, death and more.

The political battles throughout the 1600s inspired many
allegiances and animosities, and women were not immune to taking sides and
writing about their views. Smith acknowledges that it is surprising to learn
how politically aware many women were at the time, and Pulter is one example.

“What we don’t expect is that these women have competence in
politics, but Pulter is a great royalist and writes some of the longest and
most sophisticated poetry about Charles I and his execution,” he said. “She has
things to say that you don’t find anywhere else in printed or handwritten
verse.”

Similarly, another writer concerned with politics whose work he
said “has gained a lot from recovery” is Lucy Hutchinson (1620-1681). She was a
republican sympathizer, whose poetry — much of which was recovered in the last
15 years — is “some of the most astute political writing and shows as good an
understanding of English politics as some of the greatest minds of the time,
such as Thomas Hobbes,” Smith said.

Hutchinson wrote an account of the life of her husband, who fought
on the side of Oliver Cromwell against the royalists, which Smith said could
really be read as her own autobiography. But the poetry for which Hutchinson is
best known is her translation, from Latin into English, of Lucretius’ ancient
epic poem, “De Rerum Natura.”

A beneficiary of a good education, Hutchinson used her evident
aptitude for Latin to take on a poem that Smith said “essentially professes
atheism,” since it “describes a universe made up of atoms.” It was a bold
project and a successful one — Smith lauds Hutchinson’s translation as still
being one of the best.

Whenever Smith teaches Hutchinson to Princeton undergraduates,
which he does in the course “The 17th Century,” he includes passages from
“Order and Disorder,” a book published under her brother’s name, which has
graphic accounts of childbirth. It was recovered from obscurity and attributed
to Hutchinson by David Norbrook, the Merton Professor of English Literature at
Oxford, in 1999.

“The passages on childbirth — the sheer experience of being a woman
— put into epic verse form, have to be a first,” said Smith. “It’s both physically
and psychologically close to the bone, and always gets the students’
attention.”

Another writer Smith is intent on making more visible is Katherine
Philips (1632-1664), whose work circulated mostly in manuscript during her
lifetime, and was printed in a complete collection after her death.

Smith says Philips is especially noteworthy for the literary salon
she cultivated while living in Wales. “She corresponded with people well known
on the literary map,” said Smith, observing that there was a good chance that
Marvell also had read her verse in manuscript.

In particular, Philips wrote many poems to other women, leading to
current-day speculation about her sexuality. “Her poems are both very refined
and almost too intimate in an emotional way,” said Smith.

Like Pulter, she was also a royalist and, according to Smith,
“treats love and politics of equal importance.” And like Hutchinson, she was
also a translator — Philips translated a play from French by Pierre Corneille,
which was performed in Dublin.

Putting texts in context

In teaching these writers, Smith, who is deputy director of
Princeton’s Center for the Study of Books and Media, takes an interdisciplinary
approach, folding in lessons on British political and religious history, and
making connections to literary developments on the European continent.

He tells his students about the importance of Puritanism in
creating many first-time authors, explaining that in order to join a
Congregational church, individuals had to write an account of how they had come
to be saved. Some of these “conversion narratives” — which were written by
women as well as men — were published by churches, and offer slices of
autobiography that, according to Smith, are sometimes “raw, unusual and
unpredictable documents.”

In the undergraduate course he team-taught this semester with
historian Peter Lake — “Topics in the Renaissance: Utopias in the Early Modern
World” — Smith discussed some of these conversion narratives, as well as the
17th-century British writer Margaret Cavendish, who wrote poetry and a play
about women going into battle to support their husbands.

Also in the works, Smith is developing a conference with Sara Poor,
associate professor of German, which will focus on medieval to early modern
writing across Europe. Smith expects that the conference will help to relate
the accomplishments of British women writers to that of their important female
counterparts writing in Dutch and German.

Doctoral student in English Lisa Wilde, who has studied several of
these authors and has taken two classes with Smith, said he has an
“astonishingly comprehensive knowledge of 17th-century literature” that he puts
in context for his students.

“As a teacher, he’s very effective at showing the real importance
women writers had within existing patterns of influence and literary
interaction, rather than treating them — as many scholars do — as exceptions or
special cases simply because they’re women,” she said.

Genelle Gertz-Robinson, an assistant professor of English at
Washington and Lee University, on whose dissertation committee Smith served at
Princeton, said he taught her to “read in the archives to find new texts, place
those texts in their own bibliographic milieu, and use historical and cultural
studies to make sense of them.” Now she is using his example in her own
research and teaching about 17th-century women writers.

In conjunction with bringing the writing of these women authors
into his and others’ classrooms, Smith is adding life to their work through his
own. For example, his new version of Marvell’s “Poems” will include more
annotations about their writing than when the book was first published in 2003.
He also is preparing an anthology on early modern radical writing, which will
discuss some of these women. Another project he is planning is a comparative
study of writing in the European vernaculars — after Latin — that will cover
these writers, in addition to new work on Milton and a biography of Marvell.

“The fact is,” said Smith, “there is still so much more to uncover
and understand about our literary past. Our thoughtful consideration of it can
and should play an important role in preparing for the future.”